The day after Indian Affairs Minister Jim Prentice refused to meet with his provincial counterpart to discuss the occupation and its costs, Haldimand County Mayor Marie Trainer said the finger-pointing is exasperating for residents who just want the ordeal to come to an end.
“They are just playing games right now,” Trainer said about the escalating war of words. “We’re in the middle. We’re the ones suffering.”
“I’d like them to stop acting like children. I wish they would quit holding Caledonia residents as hostages. It’s pretty frustrating.”
Six Nations Chief Allen MacNaughton echoed Trainer’s sense of urgency for Prentice and the Ontario government to end their spat.
“It is with great concern that the Hodiyenehsoh find the Crown, in right of Ontario and Canada, engaged in playing politics in the media,” MacNaughton said in a statement.
“We sincerely hope the two levels of government in Canada will be able to work out their differences and return to the negotiating table with renewed determination.”
MacNaughton urged Prentice to become directly involved in talks with Six Nations Confederacy chiefs to reach a settlement in the land dispute.
Although the province purchased the land in question and is negotiating, Premier Dalton McGuinty has increasingly argued land claims are a federal responsibility, and said Tuesday that Ottawa must “step up to the plate.”
That comment prompted Prentice to cancel his meeting with David Ramsay, Ontario’s minister responsible for aboriginal affairs, later that evening.
Prentice said Ontario is solely responsible for paying the costs of occupation — now pegged at $40 million for policing, business compensation and the purchase of the disputed land.
“The Constitution is very clear. Property and civil rights, the administration of justice and policing are all provincial responsibilities,” Prentice said in an interview.
“What’s missing here is the justification for the province to say this is a federal obligation to pay for this. While the federal government has responsibility for Indians, that doesn’t override provincial law.”
Prentice said he’s been working hard to end the “oldest land claim in Canada,” appointing fact finders, negotiators and meeting with key provincial and aboriginal leaders to help sort out the dispute.
“I’m prepared to discuss the issues in a serious way with (the province) any time they choose, but I’m not going to be part of a media circus and political grandstanding about the issue,” he said.
McGuinty responded to the snub by calling the federal Conservative thin-skinned, and said people shouldn’t get into politics if they can’t take criticism. A clearly frustrated McGuinty repeated his demand that Ottawa take a lead role in negotiating an end to the dispute.
“They’ve got to understand, it’s not going to go away,” McGuinty said. “If it’s not Caledonia, it’s going to be land claims issues elsewhere across the country. This is an issue that’s been percolating on the backburner for a long time now.”
People want to see the dispute resolved, McGuinty said.
“They want us to meet,” he said. “And I think they want us to respect each other’s constitutional responsibilities.”
But no new meeting between the two levels of government has been set.
The federal government should start settling smaller side-issues with the Six Nations protesters and establish some goodwill to resolve the larger land claim issue, said Aboriginal Affairs Minister David Ramsay.
“We don’t want to have these disputes,” he said. “We want to get these things settled for the people of Ontario and especially the aboriginal people in that area who — for a couple hundred years — have not had justice.”
Ramsay said he didn’t know how long this dispute would take to resolve but “it should be sooner rather than later.”
In the meantime, Caledonia residents are losing faith.
“They have really lost focus about what this whole thing is about,” Trainer said of the politicians. “They’re forgetting about the people who are suffering every day — their nerves are shot, they’re on tranquilizers, they’re on heart medication. It’s not a good thing.”
McGuinty’s ramped-up rhetoric about Ottawa’s role in the Caledonia dispute is the latest tough talk about how Ontario is getting short-changed under the federal Conservatives.
That Liberal tactic has backfired, critics said. Conservative Leader John Tory said Caledonia residents were looking for progress on the standoff and are seeing “a jousting match instead.”
NDP Leader Howard Hampton said the Liberal government is paralyzed and is falling back on the “tired old politics of blame and squabble.”
Six Nations protesters have occupied the former housing development site in Caledonia since February. Their occupation has been marred by violent clashes with town residents and barricades that cut the town in half.
The aboriginals say they are prepared to stay on the land — which they say was taken illegally from them 200 years ago — until it is returned to them.